


Here Be Dragons

by completetheory



Category: Cthulhu Mythos - H. P. Lovecraft, LOVECRAFT H. P. - Works
Genre: Alien Culture, Gen, IN SPACE!, Nonbinary Character, Queer Gen, Science Fiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-26
Updated: 2020-05-26
Packaged: 2021-03-02 18:40:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,410
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24381451
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/completetheory/pseuds/completetheory
Summary: Why are humans so difficult, and so fascinating?
Comments: 6
Kudos: 26





	Here Be Dragons

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MadScientific](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MadScientific/gifts).



The shields had failed long ago. 

The ship was hermetically sealed, generating breathable conditions by way of atriums, and could carry on with automated processes for six generations, whether the pilot was alive or not. As it stood, the pilot could survive for several months before things began to break before their ability to repair, but they'd lost contact with Earth a week ago, and no star maps were available this far out. 

The alien was another matter entirely. 

The entity was there, after every four-D jump, floating outside the main viewing window, framed like a seal in a zoo. Except it was the _pilot_ who felt like an animal on display. They'd tried communicating, but it hadn't acknowledged any of the computer translated languages. 

More concerning, it had what looked like a head injury, bleeding mercury into the vacuum of space. The wound continued to ooze over the following weeks of mutual observation, with no sign of healing, so the pilot hoped it was a strange biological quirk. As there was no way to talk, or to help it, the initial excitement of first contact gave way to disappointment, and then to apathy. The pilot bent their energies toward console repair instead, ignoring their guest's wreathed tentacles as it lingered outside.

One day, for no discernible reason, the alien kicked away from its vigil, floated to the entry hatch, and knocked. 

The pilot set aside the electrical tape. "I'm sorry. If I open the door, I'll depressurize the cabin, and die. I can't survive out there like you." 

Even though the likelihood of comprehension was slim, they felt it fair to explain. The creature peered in again, with both 'hand' tentacles pressed to the glass, an eyeless question in their body language. 

"Can you see me? I wonder what you want." They squinted at the alien, haloed by cosmic dust. "You have hypsodont dentition, so you're probably a herbivore. Or you eat some other fibrous, tough material. You don't look like you chase or kill anything. And there's a lot of octopus in you. Space kelp, huh?"

They laughed at their own joke. "Anyway, don't worry. Maybe it's my bias, thinking you're sentient - you look like you may have once had eyes like me, now there's just vestigial skin there. Your skull is... similar to a human's, though." 

The alien did nothing. 

"You're tracking my movements. Your face is pointed at my mouth. You can't detect sound through the glass...? How can you see me?" 

The alien smiled. It didn't look like combativeness, anyway. 

"Are you hurt? You've been bleeding for weeks." The pilot touched their head, indicating, "Here. Hurt? Pain?" They made a sad expression. Maybe body language was more important to the entity than words. Maybe it used echolocation, or similar. 

It did not come naturally to them to watch the writhing of the tentacles, or the slight paling or darkening of the alien's silvery dust to dull or bright, but the smile widened, and the mouth moved. No sound carried in space. 

"Right. I'm just wasting my time." 

The pilot sat back with the electrical tape, but glanced up again at a tapping on the glass. The alien breathed hot, and traced a question mark into the moisture before it froze. Time, too, seemed to freeze, with the tape dangling from their fingers. 

"How-... how do you know that?" 

They scrambled up again, touching the glass where the alien's hieroglyph was marked, and the tentacle found the corresponding place, as if to touch. The glass darkened, a creeping blackness that drew light in hungrily. The pilot drew back, the first real fear mingling with amazement, tempered by the length of time spent with the alien as a non-hostile entity. 

What if this being, who survived in the cold airlessness of the abyss, had no real context for 'depressurize' or 'suffocate'? What if this strange separation of atoms tore the hull of the ship in two?

Then... there would be no further mortal concerns. 

But the alien was inside, their being flowing between the invisible spaces of the glass like water through a grate, damaging neither. In person and up close, the alien sprawled about the cabin, with long tentacles several feet from the waist's epicenter, and the head wound still characteristically bleeding, up close looking more like an ragged and bitten tongue protruding from the back of their head.

A tentacle twined around their command chair, exploratory, and the eyeless skull evaluated the instrumentation. Emboldened, the pilot guessed, "You already spoke English, don't you. You've been to Earth." 

"Certainly," Said the alien, in accented English, alike to Welsh, "We all have." 

_We all have._ The pilot's throat was dry. They tried not to think about the failed shields, the isolation, the homesickness. The way the alien was looking at the console... Not too proud to ask for help, but unwilling to take what they hadn't earned. The entity had no reason to want to help them, outside the altruism peculiar to social species. Potentially a herbivore, though...

As if reading their thoughts, the entity leaned over the console, flexing their entire spine a hundred eighty degrees - if spine they had at all - and still 'facing' the pilot. "I am the Bringer of Strange Joys. I was named so by those on Meiosei, a dwarf planet near your own. I have many names on your world, and not all of them so fond. Once, they called me Prometheus, once Loki. Many times, they called me Satan." 

The pilot's mouth worked, struggling to wrap around the enormity of that declaration. "You must be old." 

"Thank you." The Bringer's lips quirked, a tentacle resting on the back of the chair. "You've tried to relay from satellite. But talking to Earth won't do you any good." 

"I wanted coordinates. I'm lost out here. The timecurve engines - if you were on Earth long enough ago to be called Satan, you know it's new technology." 

The alien lifted their chin. There was something in their pride that could be mistaken for Lucifer. The Genius of Evil. And yet both Prometheus and Satan had brought their own form of strange joy - fire, and freedom. Only the latter had been vilified by history, though their actions were very similar - the defiance of the ruling gods, and eternal torment. 

"You make so much effort to come to space, and then you want to go home."

The pilot sat on a crate. "I just want to know I _could_ go home. I can survive out here a few more months, at least. I was afraid." 

That much was true, and went uncontested. The alien crouched in front of the communications equipment, then bypassed it entirely to input information onto the navigational array. The pilot looked up. 

"I don't expect you to help." They said. 

The Bringer 'looked' over one shoulder, eyeless skin tight over empty orbital sockets. "Because I'm not a hominid?" 

"Well. Not even every human is determined to be helpful." The pilot admitted, "But I haven't given you a reason." 

The tentacles didn't pause in their work. "Oh, I don't know about that." They imitated the pilot's voice perfectly, suddenly, "Here. Hurt? Pain?" 

The sound of their own voice was unnerving, but even offering to help had impressed them, apparently. "So... you're a shapeshifter." 

No answer but an indulgent chuckle. The computer chirped with the input of new coordinates. The alien stretched, catlike, with the inclusion of pops and cracks, hinting at bone but with the impossible flexibility of the octopi family, and then the Bringer whipped around with all speed, relaxing again into a hunch against the artificial gravity of the ship. 

"There. That is your star chart home, and considered a reward for curiosity, more than kindness. And if you should like to repay me, little ape..." The mouth opened, slavered, a black ink dripping from those herbivore's teeth, collecting in a pool of their tentacled arm. Then they drew an arcane symbol on the wall of the ship, something that looked like a multi-spiraling nexus with several small buds protruding from the ends. "My companion of Yellow Silk can always use new acolytes. Do a little research on this if you get back to Earth, and you'll find them easily enough. Otherwise..." 

The Bringer stepped up to the glass again, pressing into it to leave the way they had come. 

"...Well. Otherwise, don't stray so far from your porch in future."


End file.
